December 13th, 2006

This is the first shell scripting guide I’ve seen that doesn’t suck. It’s worth it to every programmer to learn shell scripting, bash files, unix/linux command line, blah blah blah whatever. It’s all the same. After overcoming your initial disgust and/or horror you’ll come to realize something, it’s actually pretty useful. The Linux programmer types are evil, to be sure, but they really know how to get the job done when you want to be hardcore about it. Just in case you don’t know, Windows users can use Cygwin to bring the Unix command line experience to them.

The most important thing to know is that the language used in the command line is the exact same thing as a shell script. That’s all a shell script really is, line after line of commands as if somebody typed them one after the other. I enjoy it so much now that I run my website entirely through a command line (frontends are for suckers) and it’s actually much easier in the long run once you get over the learning curve.